A leading figure in the field of modern Chinese philosophy, Fung Yu-lan (Feng Yu-lan) has lived and worked amidst the intellectual and political tensions which have characterised the recent history of his country. His major work, Chung-kuo Che-hsueh Shih (History of Chinese Philosophy), was published in the 1930s, and is known in the West through the monumental translation into English prepared by Professor Derk Bodde of the University of Pennsylvania. Fung's technical philosophical theories were defined and articulated in his wartime writings during the 1940s. Like many of the leading Chinese intellectuals, he has now embraced Marxism-Leninism, the new orthodoxy which provides the doctrinal creed for contemporary China even as Confucianism did for the scholar-officials of the imperial period.